Mary

Mary’s Loved Ones, which are porcelain figurines of little children, are a symbol that plays into the Stigma of Mental Illness and Medical Trauma. In New York, the Loved Ones are Mary’s only friends and are her pseudo-children. She has long, drawn-out conversations with them and imagines them talking back to her. The Loved Ones offer idealized images of childhood:

They all have different names, different faces, different outfits; some feed animals, like goats or geese or puppies or birds, some are sniffing flowers or marching with bread or heading to school or trying on oversize boots or just sitting and staring as sweetly as can be. But they all have one thing in common. They’re all perfect (36).

Mary’s love of these snapshots of perfection contrasts with the torment and suffering of her own childhood: the deaths of her parents, her mental illness and possession by Damon, and the abuse she faced at Clearview. As an adult, Mary is fiercely protective of her Loved Ones, showing them the kind of attention and care that she has never received but would have wanted. When Nadine smashes all her Loved Ones, Mary is finally driven to violence; she uses the porcelain shards to kill Nadine.

The Cross family had similar figurines in their apartment, which indicates that the Loved Ones also represent Mary’s connection to Damon. This, coupled with the fact that fragments of the statuettes create horrifying finds for children at the Easter egg hunt, shows that the figurines are not the harmless images of childhood purity that Mary imagines. Instead, they are a manifestation of what Mary internalized about herself at Clearview: that her mental illness makes her bad and that she must will herself to be as good and quiet as porcelain. The novel ends with Mary’s acceptance of her violent side: She can be powerful, loud, and hurtful—a weapon like the ceramic shards.